Do Sore Muscles Grow Faster?
After participating in some kind of arduous physical activity, especially something new to your body, it is common to develop sore muscles.
Fitness experts refer to the progressively escalating soreness that occurs between 24 and 48 hours following activity as delayed onset muscle soreness (DOMS), and it’s perfectly normal.
This kind of muscle pain isn’t the same as the pain or fatigue you feel when you train. The delayed muscle soreness of DOMS is generally at its most severe within the first couple of days following a new, intense activity and gradually goes away over the next few days.
It’s a standard idea among many of us that sore muscles after a workout are a sign that you’ve activated muscle growth, and that more soreness means faster muscle growth.
However, are both of them genuinely linked? How much does muscle soreness have to do with muscle growth? Can you still build muscle while not getting sore?
In a recent study, experts got a group of subjects and divided them into 2 groups.
The first group, known as the pre-trained group, avoided damage to their muscles by slowly but surely “ramping up” their training over a 3-week period.
Group two, on other hand, jumped right into the intense training.
The two groups took part in an 8-week training program (20 minutes, three times per week)
Throughout the study, researchers measured signs of muscle damage, muscle soreness, in addition to gains in size and strength.
Indications of muscle damage, missing from the pre-trained group, were in excess of five times higher in group two.
Self-reported muscle soreness, as you may imagine considering the amount of muscle damage, was also increased in the second group.
But, and here’s what’s interesting, changes in muscle mass and muscular strength were pretty much the same between the 2 groups.
Earlier research indicates that the source of DOMS subsequent to a workout is the connective tissue that helps to join muscle fibers together, instead of the actual muscle fibers themselves.
In addition the feeling of muscle soreness seems to be the result of changes in the chemical environment surrounding muscle tissue as opposed to damage to the muscle cell itself.
In other words, the fact that you’re not sore doesn’t mean your muscles are not getting bigger. Likewise, sore muscles don’t necessarily translate into speedier growth.
Muscle soreness is merely a sign that you changed a variable in your training program, did an activity your body wasn’t accustomed to, or did a movement that just happens to result in more soreness than the others.
Will a stretching program get rid of muscle soreness?
Stretching out before or after exercise fails to diminish DOMS.
When a team of experts assessed numerous muscle soreness studies, they found that stretching right after training contributed to a typical decrease in post-exercise soreness of just two percent – a consequence that’s very likely to be of very little practical meaning for anyone.
DOMS has to do with minute damage to individual muscle fibers and the subsequent repair process. As soon as those muscle fibers have been damaged, no level of post-workout stretching can magically get rid of that damage.
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